Why walk 500 miles?

We’re figuring it out. All we know at the moment: we are late to the party.

On average, 200,000 people now walk the Camino in Spain every year. As many as 300,000 were counted in 2017, outnumbering — to the point of ne plus ultra —  the original pilgrims who started this pathway in 812 AD.  Wow, that was one thousand, two hundred years ago!

The popularity of the pathway waned for a few centuries, but interest in the pilgrimage rekindled in the early 1980s. We learned of it fewer than ten years ago, and I initially confused the Spanish path with the El Camino Real, the route connecting the 21 Spanish missions in California.

When the walking topic came up in a casual conversation with friends, the trip seemed intriguing, but it represented a scheduling nightmare. Walking 500 miles would take more than a month, plus time for travel to and from Northern California. Nancy was a teacher. I was a procurement consultant. We had busy schedules and obligations. Even though Nancy had summers off, June, July, and August were hot in Spain. It seemed unreasonable to walk across the northern edge of the Iberian Peninsula in the heat of summer, even if I could get away. (As it turned out, summer temperatures in Spain and Portugal hit records this past year.)

Then Nancy started making retirement plans while I forecast a decade more of happy labor for the world’s greatest company — Epylon, which functions more like the world’s best family than a corporation.

But then I turned 60.

In my newspaper days, I wrote about a grandmother who at age 84, climbed to the top of Mt. Whitney, California’s highest peak. My story was respective and congratulatory, but deep in my mind, I harbored “so-what” prejudices about the significance of a person walking up a hill. After all, I had been on the slopes of Mt. Whitney around age 20.

But then I turned 60.

I now respect the 84-year-old’s trek. Older and wiser, I beg forgiveness for my youthful naiveté.

At age 60, things started falling apart. On route to Hawaii one holiday, my hips delivered so much pain I could not walk through the Los Angeles airport to reach a connecting flight. I began to understand that age makes a difference. Today my brain and blood have slipped to splendid performance levels under minor-league standards.

Nancy and I had earned reputations as walkers. It was our step-counting routine. Each spring we would tackle a more significant annual challenge, like a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito, returning to San Francisco for dinner South of Market. We would easily log 26 miles. Then once, to compete with a co-worker’s record, we executed a 38.5-mile, one-day walk around Lake Washington in Seattle, absent any restrooms.

“Don’t ever make me do that again,” she said. I sort of promised.

For the convenience of my work, we could postpone a trek across a European country, but for how long? Body parts kept ailing.

But then I turn 62. Nancy officially retired.

Two-thirds of my life had passed. How much time did I have left to travel, write, meet new friends, tell stories, laugh, and return home to raise a glass to my many friends and acquaintances? How long would my hips last?

But age was not the absolute deciding factor in making the final decision to go. It just nudged us to get the walk done. More important was the challenge itself and the proper appointment of priorities. We wanted to say we walked 500 miles.

When I’m dead, no one will care how much money I saved school districts by helping them achieve good prices on technology. Not a sole will thank me for saving them a lot of paperwork work, nor should they. No one will care about my publication of books nor tips to become a better business official. But Nancy will care that I talked to her.

My breakfast buddies don’t care about procurement, but they love stories about people, struggles, history, weather, and surprise.

So Nancy and I planned the trip and committed.

While the 500-mile distance motivates us, we tend to eschew motivational clichés, such as the mountain- climbers’ mantra for their work: “Because it’s there.”

Rather, the challenge to walk 500 miles is more like a dare to grow. We are setting the stage to meet new people from across the world and think differently.

Along the way, we will set aside our stereotypes, replace our ignorance of history, grasp the geography of our planet, and humble ourselves in the simplicity and suffering born out of literally one million repetitive steps.

Camino de Santiago translates to the Way of St. James, the man who is said to be buried in Santiago de Compostela.  He was an apostle, one of the 12 followers of Jesus and the one labeled as a “Son of Thunder” for his exuberance.

The tradition of following this path hints at evidence to his role in history before and after his beheading. So for many walkers, the journey to Santiago de Compostela is a spiritual pilgrimage.

I have not approached the walk as a religious pilgrimage. I’m not one to venerate dead people, be they presidents, celebrities, or saints, so I do not see the walk so much as a pilgrimage to a religious place, but rather as a pilgrimage to vulnerability.

How haughty of me to plan to achieve greater discipline, savor silence, and tolerate pain.  How presumptions to plot for a bath in the beauty of creation, connections with strangers, and worship. Those are my own self-centered conjectures. Instead, it is likely that the most powerful lessons of the walk will be unexpected – the targeting of some prideful behavior or prejudice that boils up out of brokenness.

In the end, my view of the world will be broader and brighter, I hope.

The unexpected will come our way. You’ll have to stay tuned to see how a million steps have finally fashioned our outlook, our priorities, and our future.

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Meanwhile, we have to assemble our packs and make our way to London, our initial gateway to the continent and our urban portal toward the Pyrenees separating France and Spain.

No one wants to see a boring plethora of travel photographs, so we’ll try to make our reports interesting with stories, drawings, videos, and charts.

From the home-page menu, click on stories to see the latest Camino posts, including the latest:

• A maze of choices: How we are likely to get lost
• Will we find any trace of Picasso on the Spanish Trail?
• Where Nancy gets whipped on the Appalachian Trail
• Prologue to Spain: In the valley of the shadow of death

Stay tuned for other potential posts and updates:

• How I mock Hemingway in Pamplona with a passive-voice blog post
• Does the rain in Spain fall mainly on the plain?
• A study in hat fashion
• Will Google Translate prove embarrassing?
• Will I find Don Quixote’s windmill?
• A twist on the history of passports
• Puppy anticipation
• When my cousin gave me a bad grade in Spanish 3
• What can I learn from the Basques?